Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead Read online

  Frank stared, as corpses danced by in the globe’s hollow interior, moving precisely to the music: sheathed in translucent preservative material, fixed in a variety of dramatic poses, the bodies of all kinds of people, even a few children, flew into the near-zero-gravity core of the globe. Released from a circular opening below the other balconies, they were directed in their dance by pulsars at the extremities of the corpses; the dead were choreographed into a grand balletic display, first around the edges, close to the curved walls, then drawing in toward the center of the cloudy, light-shafted sphere. The music swelled; the corpses whirled, spun, arced up like droplets in a fountain, then spread out in choreographic symmetry, whirling like the dancers in a ballet.

  “They’ll all be guided back to their resting places,” Tet said, soothingly, “when the Communio completes the Requiem.”

  “You see, Frank?” Mella said, raspily, gazing out at the Ballet of the Dead. “They’re part of a work of art … a gigantic kinetic sculpture. I want to be part of it too.”

  Twelve hours later, Mella hadn’t changed her mind. She signed the releases at the ship’s computer interface. She signed the euthanasia release without a flicker of hesitation.

  Hands trembling, Frank dressed Mella in the pretty ivory-white clingsuit that she’d picked for the occasion. He wore his ceremonial Orbital Army uniform. It was a tad too small for him, tight at the waist. He’d gained some weight since last time he’d worn it, at Lieutenant Bernard’s funeral.

  They took the shuttle from the space station to the Soulglobe hangar, scarcely saying a word, just holding hands. Neither one of them had bothered with breakfast. Through the shuttle viewport Frank glimpsed the finale of one of the ballets, seeing it from outside the Soulglobe, through the transparent panes: floating bodies, their small, distant outlines making him think of parading chromosomes, were silhouetted against the blue glow of the hollow sphere. Peering at the exterior of the globe he could just make out the clustered blackened carbonized steel tubes of the orbital adjustment thruster, fixed into the southern pole, the external part of the fusion engine that Transcrystal Inc had installed to move the Soulglobe to this position.

  Frank was thinking, once more, of signing a euthanasia waiver too; of joining Mella in death. She was pretty much all he had in the world, except for the OA. He’d been a specialist in killing — and she’d been about life. She’d always been so lively, a believer in the beauty of living; she was his refuge from destruction. She was his center of gravity. He’d be like the moon without the Earth to orbit. And it didn’t matter to him what happened to his body after death, though the Ballet of the Dead seemed ludicrous, even humiliating. Still, he’d killed too many men, seen too many bodies in his time to really care.

  But they’d been all through it. She wouldn’t hear of his joining her in euthanasia.

  The Ballet of the Dead. Imagining Mella becoming part of that absurdity — it twisted his insides. He already felt responsible for her dying, though it hadn’t been his fault the radiation shielding on the transport had been compromised. She’d been coming to share his furlough on Mars One, both of them happy — and then she started to shrivel up, even before she arrived. Interplanetary radiation poisoning was still being studied. No one knew exactly how uninsulated exposure led to Rapid Decline Syndrome, or why it resisted the cell reboots, the revitalizations that worked for so many other illnesses. But the doctors were certain that Frank Zand’s wife was dying of the syndrome, with a great deal of suffering; that she was eligible for euthanasia.

  It was natural, he thought, that she’d be attracted to the Soulglobe. She’d been an art history teacher — an activist in the Face-to-Face Teaching movement, insisting on human, in-person teachers in a time when most children learned via cognitive transfer and VR conditioning. She wanted to be an example to her students, show her commitment to art by donating her body to a work of art.

  But there was something about the Soulglobe that alerted his protective instinct. And his instincts had grown keen on the battlefield.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t have kids,” she whispered, as he eased her float-chair out of the shuttle, along the passageway to the Euthanasia Center. Ahead of them, a wizened, white haired man in an ochre clingsuit was riding an elderchair, heading for his own euthanasia.

  Mella whispered, “I should’ve given you a baby.”

  “Not your fault, Mel,” Frank said. “None of it was.”

  “You can still have kids, with someone,” she said gently. “You should.”

  “Not without you, sweetheart,” Frank said. “Anyway — I’ve got those green brats they send me for Mars Defense. Buncha kids.”

  She smiled wanly. “I bet you are a daddy to them, too.”

  “And I bet they sure as hell don’t think of me that way.”

  Chit-chat — and she would be dead within the hour. They ought to be talking about something more serious. Maybe he should say something comforting about the afterlife, though he didn’t believe in it. Maybe he should tell Mella, again, that he loved her, that he’d never marry again. Maybe…

  But it all seemed all wrong, when he imagined saying it. Too staged. Like a ballet of the dead.

  “This looks like the entrance…” she said. She seemed more excited than afraid.

  “Mr. Jacobs and Mr. and Mrs. Zand,” said the tonsured, silver-robed Guide, stepping through the arched doorway. Unlike the gray stone around it, the archway was carved out of pearlescent crystal; a relief sculpture of human souls intertwined in an eternal dance.

  They went through the archway, and down the corridor that led to death.

  The Soulglobe had started out as a gigantic catacomb, a final repository for the wealthy on the edge of the solar system. The galleries along the stone passage still contained the first interred here, thousands of mummified remains, a few little more than skeletons, in niches cut in the naked rock, the stone marbled with the crystal that became transparent panes in much of the outer shell. This section was not so different from catacombs Frank had seen on Earth, where ancient Christians had been deposited in Roman times.

  He and Mella emerged into the stark, brightly lit contrast of the Soulglobe Transition offices, where Transcrystal Incorporated processed internees. The Guide took Mr. Jacobs into a separate receiving office for lower-income internment. Mella was greeted by a receptionist.

  Soulglobe had used up all of Mella’s savings, so Frank was glad to see they hadn’t cheaped out on the receptionist — she seemed human. He was never quite comfortable dealing with androids and androclones, though they were often more polite and thoughtful than real people. The receptionist was a pale blond woman with Asiatic eyes; she wore a flowing white dress, her full, dark-red lips bent in a sweet, infinitely-understanding smile as she came from behind the marbled-crystal desk to bend over the float chair and take Mella’s hands in hers. “You’ll be Mella!” the woman said, her voice velvety. She gazed into Mella’s eyes as she spoke. “I’m Sestrine. And look at you, smiling and ready! You look luminous!” She gently squeezed Mella’s hands. “We’ll check your DNA, and then you’ll go right in … if you’re ready.”

  And it seemed to Frank that Mella, frowning slightly, was about to ask a question — maybe she had misgivings, after all. But as Sestrine gazed steadily at her, Mella’s frown vanished. She sighed and nodded. “Yes. I’m ready.”

  “It’s painless, right?” Frank asked. “I mean — they say it is. But…”

  Sestrine let go of Mella’s hands, and gave her smile to Frank. “It’s painless, yes — and quite pleasant, judging from the way people react. Now, if you’ll come this way, we’ll do the scan and then you can say your good-byes outside the transition chamber…”

  Frank stood on the balcony of passage seventy-seven, and waited for the music to start. Mist swirled in the great globular chamber; a few other people could be seen, small and far away, in the semicircles of passage entrances across the blue-lit interior. A soft wind moaned; cryptic sounds echoed. A
nd Frank ached inside.

  He had been ready to take Mella out of there, back to the shuttle, right up to the moment they closed and sealed the door of the chamber. Watching through the window as Mella, in a wheeled bed, was being put to sleep with a colorless gas — and she looked, in fact, like she was sinking happily into a blissful sleep — Frank had felt numb, and unreal. The receptionist had stood by him, her hands clasped, offering silent sympathy.

  After a few moments, as Mella succumbed, and the gas was cleared, the tonsured Guide entered the euthanasia chamber, and wheeled Mella’s bed through a farther door. A gleaming silver door.

  Lingering, trying to accept it all, Frank had asked the receptionist, his voice hoarse, “What’s through that silver door? Some kind of … embalming?”

  “We don’t exactly embalm transitioners, Mr. Zand. Soulglobe is distinct in that we preserve the body perfectly, just as it is when the transitioner dies. The coatings do that. That’s what takes place through that door.”

  “What if I wanted to go and see the place where they prepare the body?”

  “No one is allowed in there, sir. We wouldn’t want to violate the privacy of others being interred.”

  There was something in the way she’d said it. Something very still, and wary…

  He’d felt very little, watching Mella go to sleep. It just didn’t look much like death. But he couldn’t quite accept that she was gone. Frank Zand was a soldier, he’d lost a lot of close friends — he knew about grief. He knew that often people don’t feel much at first. Grief can gestate like an embryo inside you. Sometimes it shows up in funny ways, maybe in distraction, in a blanket of numbness — or in slow-simmering anger.

  He was distantly aware that his hands had clenched into fists as he stood there, waiting for the first strains of Mozart. His main feeling, at that moment, was bitterness — the bitterness of a man who’d been cheated.

  One good thing. That’s all he’d had, that’s all he’d wanted. Mella. And then…

  And then the Requiem began to play. The music rose, and human bodies flew by through the center of the Soulglobe, neatly dressed corpses frozen in various shapes. The posed bodies made trails in the blue mist through the nearly zero-gravity space of the interior of the Soulglobe.

  Frank watched and waited. They’d told him that if he stood exactly here, and tilted his head downward—

  There she was! His heart caught in his throat as Mella came soaring up toward him, frozen in a dancing posture, arms over her head, one hip cocked; postured forever for some ancient dance of her Middle Eastern ancestors.

  Frank drew his fone from a pocket, though it was against Transcrystal rules to use it here. He held it up as she drifted by, found her in the little viewscreen — it was already attuned to look for her — and pressed binocular. The outline of her floating body rushed to fill the fone screen, then her face was there, seen up close. She was still gaunt, but they’d done some cosmetic work on her, and her eyes were open as she flew past.

  And her eyes moved — didn’t they? They seemed to look around. Just a little. Looking for him.

  Then she had passed upward, flown past.

  Illusion. Had to be illusion. She was dead, she couldn’t look around. There was something in the brochure about that kind of illusion. People supposing they see faces moving … bodies twitching with life … illusion of motion…

  Why was it the contract had insisted that no digital recorders, no fones, could be brought into the Soulglobe?

  Frank shook his head. He must have been mistaken. He’d seen an illusion generated by disguised grief, and denial.

  But that nagging feeling, the instinct that had kept him alive all these years, wouldn’t go away…

  There were ways to be sure. Why not? Did he care what any of these funeral hucksters thought? He didn’t. And now the choreography of the dead was bringing his wife’s body back, circling her down and up again, returning her to his vantage. Closer … still closer…

  What he did next simply happened — it was as if his body did it and his mind just went along. He ran to the edge of the balcony and leapt out into space.

  He was Orbital Army. He had hundreds of hours of training, and experience, in low-G and zero-G deployment. His timing was right the first time.

  The leap took him out past the pull of the shell’s low gravity, into the nearly-Zero-G zone, toward the interior of the asteroid — he intercepted Mella, clasping her around the waist as if in a football tackle. Against his cheek he felt the soft envelope of transparent synthetic clinging to her. His momentum carried them both out of the dance line, toward the centerpoint of the spherical space. He wasn’t moving very quickly; he was able to reach up to her shoulders, to pull her down so her face aligned with his. His eyes looked into hers. The transparent film around her face seemed perforated. They gave her a little air. Why?

  As he watched, the pupils of her eyes contracted; her lips twitched as if she were trying to speak. She was cold to the touch — but not deathly cold. Her eyes moved, seeming to direct his gaze downward, toward her neck. He looked. There, two small red puckers, close together, one above the other. He got a better grip on her with his left hand; with his right he reached up and pressed through the plastic over the puckers, thumbed the makeup away from the skin of her throat. The pressure revealed two clear-cut puncture marks in her jugular. They’d said they didn’t embalm, so why’d they puncture her?

  To Frank, they looked like bite marks.

  He looked into her eyes. “Someone’s hurt you, Mella. Is that what it is? Can you blink once to say yes — twice for no?”

  She looked back at him but there was no blinking. She didn’t blink at all.

  “I know you’re alive, sweetheart,” Frank said. “I’m here with you.”

  Then he felt the inner shift that announced he was past the midway point of the asteroid’s interior, his momentum carrying him across the space toward the farther wall. The semicircular openings grew larger as he approached. He thought he saw someone in a gray security guard’s uniform waiting on the balcony directly across from him. The man had a weapon in his hand.

  Frank took a good grip on his wife, clasping her to him, and flipped himself, in a way that experience had taught him would change his direction in near-zero. They somersaulted together, and when he saw the openings again they were closer — and he was heading for a different one, relatively higher. His heart pounded; he could feel Mella, clasped in his arms, could feel the life in her — but it seemed feeble, like the last words whispered by a very old woman. I’m alive. But I’m going … goodbye…

  “Mel! I love you, hon, listen, I…”

  Then the farther balcony loomed up, and he had turned them both in the air so he could land on it feet first, skidding on the floor as he hit its stronger gravity. He was moving crookedly, and they stopped against a wall with a mild thump to his right shoulder.

  Frank set Mella gently down on her back, close to the wall, and tore the plastic sheathing away. A chemical smell wafted up as he wadded the sheathing and tossed it aside. He rubbed her arms. He felt her wrist for a pulse. That might be one — faint and irregular.

  He bent over her, blew breath into her lungs. He pumped her chest. One of her eyes fluttered. A creaking sound came out of her throat. After a moment he realized he was hearing his own name. “Frank…”

  “You’re alive!”

  “Yes. Frank. They…” She gulped, spoke each word in a gasp. “Feed. Slow. Death. Frank. Get … away.”

  “Mel — hon, relax. Just relax, I’m getting you out of here, this wasn’t how—”

  “All visitors to the Soulglobe are required to evacuate.” The voice boomed from hidden speakers. “There is a terrorist element at large in Soulglobe. Return to the shuttle immediately. All visitors…”

  So that’s what they were calling him. A terrorist.

  He picked Mella up in his arms, and started down the passageway. A tram would take them to the shuttle. But there’d be securi
ty waiting there for him. Have to find a way around them.

  Hurrying with long strides, he turned the corner — and caught the sizzling sound of a razorgun. He glimpsed two men in gray uniforms, teeth bared, smart carbines leveled from their hips. A squat, thick-bodied man was firing; the tall gangly one still fumbling with his gun. Razor rounds scored Frank’s right side, and chunked into his left shoulder, a familiar sensation — the Orthos liked razor guns. They could be set to cause a lot of bleeding, and there was a lot of blood gushing — but it was mostly Mella’s blood.

  He stepped back, lowered her to the stone floor around the corner. Her blood pumped out from the razorgun gash in her neck. “Mel!”

  “Frank.” She took one long final breath. “Get … away.”

  Her gaze seemed to freeze in place, as if she were mesmerized by some sight seen in the beyond — her blood-flow slowed to a trickle. Her head drooped to the side.

  She was really gone this time. They’d killed her, trying to get him.

  Two long shadows stretched from the corner, growing longer. They were coming, whispering to one another. Neither was eager to be the first, not knowing if he had a weapon.

  Frank didn’t wait for them. Propelled by fury, he rushed around the corner, grabbing the muzzle of the nearest guard’s carbine before he had a chance to react. OA training took over, and he used the quarter-gravity to good effect, slamming his shoulder into the man’s thick gut as he wrenched the gun free. The guard sprawled backward; Frank went with him, reversing the gun as he went and firing point blank. Because this was the one who had killed Mel.

  Frank’s razor rounds cut through the stocky guard, slicing up from under his ribs, through his chest, his throat, up into the man’s skull, out the top of his head in a jet of gray brain matter and blood. Two razor rounds sparked from the stone floor as the lanky one fired at him — Frank rolled, came up firing, aiming at the other guard’s gun, pressing the charge button so each projectile carried a pulse of electricity. The guard’s right arm splashed blood, and he staggered back, tendons cut, gun clattering to the floor.